Composting (in) the STS Classroom: Learning to Stay With the Disgusting Other

Teaching waste poses a pedagogical difficulty: the matter that most demands critical attention is the matter students least want to touch. This article takes that difficulty as the starting point for a critical Science and Technology Studies (STS) pedagogy, asking what happens when disgust is neither managed away nor moralized, but held as a resource for learning. It draws on the redesign of an interdisciplinary course at the intersection of technology and culture in Hong Kong, where a Service Learning practicum placed more than 120 students over four semesters inside a food–waste-cycling network with periurban farms and a zero-waste community group. Reflective essays, group reports, classroom discussion, teaching fieldnotes, and a student focus group trace how aversion loosened into habituation, curiosity, and care as students handled rot, turned piles, and animated soil. I develop the concept of an affective–material device to name how composting makes embodied techniques of learning visible—as material relatedness and as natureculture in practice—and to show the STS classroom being cocreated by educators, students, community partners, and nonhuman actors. Composting the STS classroom names a practice of unlearning the bodies, ideas, matters, and technologies that make and remake waste relations, so that learners might collectively stay (a bit closer) with the trouble.